Croissants as a commestible have become extremely popular. However, they are time consuming to prepare as the dough must be prepared, kneaded, cut and rolled up, permitted to rise and finally baked. In an attempt to reduce the preparation time by the ultimate seller of the baked product to the consumer (whether at a restaurant or local bakery), large bakeries have mass produced the dough, cut the dough into the desired shape, rolled the dough up into the croissant in a substantially flat or straight form, then packaged and frozen the dough. The forms were usually packed, prior to freezing, by placing them in multiple layers on waxed paper in a flat box prior to freezing, then frozen and shipped. The drawback with this prior art proposal has been the amount of time involved in the process of thawing and reshaping the forms. In particular, an interval of time after the forms have thawed is necessary to permit the dough to regain its elasticity so that it may be manually bent into the normal crescent shape of croissant.
In a more recent approach, the rolled dough forms are placed in annular recesses of a tray, stretched about a central raised stem and then frozen. The dealer, upon receiving the frozen dough, will then remove the frozen forms from the annular recesses in the tray and arrange them on a baking sheet where they will be permitted to thaw and proof without requiring further shaping to conform to the normal crescent shape of croissant. Normally, where such a tray is employed, one tray may not be surmounted on another tray for packaging a stack of such trays since an annular recess presenting a mouth on one side of the tray will present a protuberance on the other side of the tray which will extend into the mouth of an annular recess presented by an underlying tray, deforming the croissant dough contained in the annular recess. Normally this is the case where for example, each tray has a plurality of similarly spaced annular recesses such that when one tray is superimposed on another, similarly spaced protuberances will align with identically spaced recesses of the underlying tray. While this drawback may be overcome, for example by irregularly spacing the plurality of annular recesses in each tray and orienting stacked trays 180 degrees with respect to one another, such a solution does not permit the maximum use of the area of the tray for annular recesses, since a portion of the top surface area of an underlying tray would be devoted to supporting the protuberances of an overlying tray.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an improved tray suitable for use in carrying croissant dough and for packaging a plurality of such trays stacked one on the other.
Further and other aspects of the invention will be realized by those skilled in the art from the following summary of the invention and detailed description of an embodiment thereof.